Networking on the web

There is a growing number of tools for networking on the web. Facebook is great for social networking, but it can be very distracting and difficult to manage. There are so many facets to it that it is probably inappropriate for direct communication focused on scientific exchanges. Indeed, there is a group in Facebook for construction management researchers. But it may make you despair of the human condition, because it is filled with trivial requests from people who are not researchers asking questions of an entirely random nature and with no sense of who their questions are directed at. It is pretty hopeless and probably needs to be closed down, yet there are more than 500 members on it from all over the world. Most of them just seem desperate to find someone to talk to, or seek a forum for advertising their wares. It fails where other tools succeed.

In our field, probably the most successful tool to date is the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers (CNBR). This has been going for 21 years and has more than 2500 members globally. It is only an email network, but it is really successful and enables some very useful discussions. It also enables unavoidable chit-chat and distractions, but not too much.

There are plenty of other places where we can develop networks, if we wish to. Academia.edu, for example. I have a profile there at http://reading.academia.edu/WillHughes and this enables me to connect with people who share my research interests. There is not the opportunity for chit-chat like there is on CNBR, and it is less intrusive in the daily diet of emails (if you set it it up right). You can upload papers and books, presentations, CVs, all sorts of academic outputs, and by tagging them with keywords, you become visible to like-minded people around the globe. This is a good way of finding new research contacts.

A new service is Mendeley. This looks like an excellent tool. Primarily it is useful for managing bibliographies. But it also enables the setting up of groups, whether for your own research team, for a department, for a global group of people who share similar interests. One really useful thing about this service is that unlike academia.edu, you don’t need to type in your publications from scratch, because it connects to many bibliographical databases and imports the details of papers that you identify as yours. It is quite quick to set up a profile and although I have only been looking at it for a day, it appears to have some really useful functions.

If networking with a mixture of practitioners and academics, I would recommend LinkedIn, because it has quite a good reach and does not involve all the distracting “fun stuff” that you get in facebook. It is a good way to get connected to all sorts of people, but if you are only looking for academic contacts, it is probably not for you.

Finally, if all you want to do is let off steam every so often and have a rant about something, get yourself a BLOG! I have found this to be useful for more than just the occasional rant. I can use it to collect advice and guidance that I give to students and to authors of papers in the journal. Over the months and years, a collection of guidance notes is accumulating here, and it is very easy to point people to short things that I have already written, which saves me from writing them again. I can return to edit old posts, and also place here contributions that I may have developed for other reasons (this post, for example, started out life as a contribution to an email discussion).

There is a lot to be said for using the appropriate tool for the job. It is highly unlikely that we will find one service that fulfils all aspirations. We need different tools for different tasks. Join me in some of these services, and we can explore these things together and see what we can achieve!

Poorly designed surveys

I am intrigued by the increasing flow of surveys that come across my desk. I wonder how many practitioners subscribe to academic construction research journals? Worse, how do you write up a survey when you have not defined a sampling frame? What would you state about the population, the sample and the return rate? I recall recently seeing one correspondent getting quite irate with people in his industry because not enough people had completed his survey.

One recent survey was sent to the CNBR list from a research student of smoe kind. It was an interesting case in point. His first question, to an international list of construction academics is: “Have you ever worked on a construction project outside of the United States?” It was clear from the context of this question that he identifies overseas as being outside the United States. But if I had never worked overseas, I would have to answer yes to this question, since I only worked on projects at home, in UK. So, having answered yes to this question, because I have worked on projects outside the United States, the next screen asks a whole load of questions with drop-down options that make little sense to me, but clearly make a great deal of sense to the researcher.

I particularly wondered about the question “Have you worked in any country which was affected by terrorism?” I guess that the UK has been affected by terrorism – but is this really what the researcher is looking for, given that his next question asks if my family travelled with my while I worked abroad? Very confusing. Until this point I was answering questions about working on sites in the UK, a country that has been affected by terrorism (as has the USA). Now, when I think about a question about taking my family with me while I worked abroad, I have to think about when my family came with me when I travelled as an academic to countries that were not affected by terrorism. In other words, all of the questions about my working abroad elicit answers that are nothing to do with the survey. So I aborted it.

I think it is important that before sending surveys out to mailing lists, students and researchers should be encouraged to think about the traditional steps in designing surveys. I wonder what we are teaching our students that leads them to make so many errors in the design of a simple survey. There are so many good books on this topic, but, for now, here are a couple of web resources to help researchers to get to grips with the basics of survey design:

• http://www.statpac.com/surveys/
• http://iss.leeds.ac.uk/info/312/surveys/217/guide_to_the_design_of_questionnaires
• http://sysurvey.com/tips/arsham.htm
  (This last one has a long list of useful links at the end)

The reason that I am going into this detail and posting these links is because so many surveys we receive in papers submitted to Construction Management and Economics are so badly designed that they contribute nothing to our collective knowledge. I frequently think that these poorly designed surveys do nothing other than confirm what the researcher thought in the first place, and as such they are simply a waste of paper.

I look forward to the day when we see fewer badly designed surveys...

Authorship of journal papers

The Co-operative Network of Building Researchers list, cnbr-l, saw a fresh enquiry today about authorship of journal papers. I was interested that the person who prompted the enquiry appears to be a rock climber. The essence of this question was this, I’d like to invite discussion of the (possibly contentious) issue of authorship of (journal) papers in construction management – particularly who is named as authors, and in what order, when PhD candidates or other new scholars write papers. This is an issue on which I have strong views, so I responded thus:

You raise a useful and interesting question. My own view is that authorship should not be simply a right of those in authority to have their name on things whether they contributed to them or not. For what it is worth, here is how I put it in a chapter of a recent book:

One worrying aspect of authorship is the question of whether all the authors actually contributed to the writing of the text in the paper. There are different traditions in different areas of science. For example, in some sciences, the head of the institution, the head of the research team, the technicians who provided the resources to enable the research are all cited as joint authors, even though they may have contributed none of the text. In other areas, only those who directly contributed text would be listed as authors. The latter tends to be the case in construction management, although there are some notable exceptions. Because we operate with different assumptions, there is confusion around this issue, and all authors should clarify who will be listed, and in what sequence, before they begin work on their papers, to avoid divisive and difficult arguments later in the process. One alternative to joint authorship, for someone who is not actually an author, is to include mention of them in the acknowledgements (Hughes, W.P. (2008) Getting your research published in refereed journals. In: Knight, A. and Ruddock, L (eds). Advanced Research Methods in the Built Environment, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 193-206)

To answer your questions directly, my opinion is that PhD students should be encouraged to write sole author papers, and it is the responsibility of the supervisor to help structure the paper, comment on drafts, and help see it through the publication process, in the role of supervisor, not in the role of co-author. But I know that this is not everyone’s preference. If a supervisor actually writes part of the paper, then of course that would justify co-authorship. However, in any serious evaluation of one person’s contribution to the field, such as a promotion panel, it is common to ask the candidate to indicate what percentage of each co-authored paper was contributed specifically by the candidate. This avoids any need to develop an algorithm for assessing the strength of authorship when there are multiple authors (as suggested by another respondent to your question).

This question is not a “construction management” issue, but an issue across all the sciences. You might be interested in a broader discussion here: http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/services/authorship.cfm where I particularly liked the opening sentence, “Studies of authorship in science suggest that traditional criteria for authorship no longer reflect the way research is actually done. Although published guidelines on authorship have existed for decades, investigations reveal that they are not followed consistently, and many researchers remain unaware of them.” I think many of us are unaware of the guidelines that already exist, and we are in danger of re-inventing the wheel, yet again! In the biomedical arena, for example, an “author” is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study (http://www.icmje.org/index.html#author).

My advice is that all authors should clarify who will be listed, and in what sequence, before they begin work on their papers, to avoid divisive and difficult arguments later in the process. To help PhD students in such discussions with their supervisors, the links to more established sciences may be of use. And I think you are right to suggest that professors do not need lots of co-authored papers on their CVs, especially conference papers.

By the way, another horror story about authorship – what about those thrusting young academics who make informal agreements to add each other’s names to all of their papers, even when they have not actually contributed, exchanging multiple authorships as favours just to pad out their CVs? Do you think that actually happens? Is it ethical? What should a journal editor do on discovering such “phantom” authorships?

I hope this helps, and I look forward to other opinions on this thorny issue.

Political leaders from construction professions

In the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers, an international e-mail list of people in the same field as me, a question was raised by Leonhard Bernold: "...our profession lacks direct connections into the political sphere, despite our crucial roles everywhere you look. How many politicians are there in the country you live with an engineering education?"

That got me thinking, and I started to make a list, to which others then added, so (probably a pointless exercise) this is a place where I can maintain and edit a list of construction professionals who achieved political influence:

• Boris Yeltsin, became president of Russia


• Osama bin Laden is sometimes said to be have qualified as a civil engineer, but it is not too clear


• Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), Palestinian Leader


• Heberto Castillo Martinez, 68, Leftist Political Leader in Mexico


• Ismail Abu Shanab: prominent leader, co-founder of Hamas


• Hundreds of engineers and architects are challenging the official 9/11 Commission Report


• Herbert Macaulay (1864-1945) was a Nigerian political leader. One of the first leaders of the Nigerian opposition to British colonial rule, he was also a civil engineer, journalist, and accomplished musician.


• Mohamed Ahmad Mahgoub, Sudanese political leader, very interesting life. A poet, a lawyer, and a very active politician at the centre of the Suez crisis in 1956.


• Robert Stephenson (1803-1859) Conservative Member of Parliament for Whitby 1847-59


• Lee Myung-bak (b1941) President of South Korea since 2008. Although he ran Hyundai Construction, his University education was Business Administration, so maybe this does not count.


• Ernest Marples, UK Minister of Transport


• Sir Keith Joseph, Director of Bovis, UK Member of Parliament 1956-87, Secretary of State for Social Services 1970-4, Secretary of State for Industry 1979-81, Secretary of State for Education and Science 1981-6.


• Paul Channon, UK Member of Parliament 1959-97,Minister for the Arts 1981-3, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1986–7, Secretary of State for Transport 1987–9.


• Nick Ridley (1929-93), UK Member of Parliament 1959-92, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1981–3, Secretary of State for Transport 1983–6, Secretary of State for the Environment 1986–9, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1989–90.


• John Gilbert (b1927), UK Member of Parliament 1970-97, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1974-5, Minister for Transport 1975-6, Minister of State for Defence 1976-9


• Nasir El Rufai (b.1960) Director General of The Bureau of Public Enterprises, and former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja from 16 July 2003 to 29 May 2007. Member of the ruling People's Democratic Party.


• President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran - A civil engineer with a PhD in civil engineering and traffic transportation planning. Also a lecturer and member of faculty at Iran University of Science and Technology.

We could go on and on with this, but I think the point is made that there are senior politicians all over the place who are engineers! What I don't understand is why people jump to conclusions like this without attempting to find out the truth of the matter first.